Wayward began as a Katrina recovery blog in 2006 but has since wandered off to consider the intersections of faith, politics, and the environment and a life lived between DC & Idaho.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Where National Security Meets Climate Change

An extremely important article in the New York Times today called "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security" documents a number of the non-environmental threats posed by inaction on climate change. The article quotes not just liberals like John Kerry but also military experts and sources like Tony Zinni, the National Intelligence Council, the DoD's National Defense University, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Amanda Dory. An excerpt:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change....

“We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.

“Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And that will involve human lives.”